Stalking, Mies van der Rohe, and Roadrunners

Just a few minutes ago as I sat at my desk, I heard a familiar cooing sound. Until last year, I would have said it was like the call of a mourning dove; now I know better. This morning, I said aloud, “I hear a…a…a…a…roadrunner.” It took me a moment to get the word in my head and out of my mouth.

My wife, in her study, responded almost immediately with “Oh, there it is. You can see it out front.”

We both peered out the windows to watch as the big bird strutted along the street, stopping occasionally to flip its tail feathers in dramatic fashion. And then it disappeared from view.  I checked earlier posts about seeing the roadrunner; I posted comments, and in one case photos, in April last year and the year before.

The cooing sound of the roadrunner had interrupted the tail end of some unnecessary detective work in which I was engaged this morning. The sleuthing began while I read an article about the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. A mention in the article that some of the buildings he designed were on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago triggered a memory that crops up from time to time. Gloria, a woman with whom I worked when I first moved to Chicago, came to mind. Once, she and her husband invited us to their apartment in a building on Lake Shore Drive, a building designed by Mies van der Rohe.  I remembered that she and her husband had planned to move to Puerto Rico to operate a bed & breakfast inn, but I don’t know if they ever did. I heard, many years later, that they had divorced. I wondered where she might live.

So, I began my unnecessary detective work; I dredged her last name from my memory and went about the task of finding her. I found no one with her name, but I found someone with another last name and, according to a website I visited, an unspecified relationship with the last name I remembered. A bit more research led me to an address and telephone number and Google Earth image of a house that, I believe, belong to the woman I knew in Chicago.  If I’m right, my Chicago acquaintance is married to someone else now and lives in a very attractive (from the outside) adobe house on Mountain View Road in Cornville, Arizona, not far from Sedona.

Some people might not call my actions detective work but, rather, stalking. I just enjoy the challenge. I have no plans to slink along the road outside her home, wait for her to emerge, and surreptitiously follow her to the Family Dollar store or Manzanita Restaurant or Grasshopper Grill a few blocks away. Nor do I have plans to watch for her on webcam feeds; it would me no good, because the closest one to Cornville is 13.1 miles away, in Sedona. 😉

 

 

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
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